The present disclosure relates to a data processing question-answering (QA) system and method, and more particularly, to a subsystem of the QA system that facilitates computer-generated follow-up questions based on the initial user question and a computer-generated answer to the user question.
With the increased usage of computing networks, such as the Internet, humans are currently inundated with the amount of information available from various structured and unstructured sources. However, information gaps are prevalent as users try to piece together relevant information that they can find during the information searches on various subjects. To facilitate such information searches, recent research is directed to generating question-answering (QA) systems that may take a user inputted question, analyze it, and return results indicative of the most probable answer or answers to the input question. QA systems provide automated mechanisms for searching through large sets of sources of data (e.g., electronic documents) and analyze the data with regard to the input question to process/determine one or more answers to the user question.
One such QA system is the Watson™ system that is available from the International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation of Armonk, N.Y. The Watson™ system is an application of advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering. The Watson™ system is built on IBM's DeepQA technology used for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring. DeepQA analyzes a user question, decomposes the question into constituent parts, generates one or more hypothesis based on the decomposed question and results of a primary search of answer sources, performs hypothesis and evidence scoring based on a retrieval of evidence from evidence sources, performs synthesis of the one or more hypothesis, and abased on trained models, performs a final merging and ranking to output an answer to the input question.